[Biblical-languages] Unicode proposals for apparatus symbols, Biblical Hebrew

Peter Kirk peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
Thu Jun 26 09:55:32 EDT 2003


Paul Nelson (TYPOGRAPHY) wrote:

>The combining class issue is not an issue if Hebrew users only use
>nikud. In reality, it is only a few edge cases of Biblical usage that
>necessitated this change. Because the change is limited to Biblical
>Hebrew usage I do not expect that there would be any problems with this
>proposal.
>
PK: In fact nikud are used mostly in biblical Hebrew and in other old 
religious texts in Hebrew (and Aramaic I guess), plus in some 
educational materials. So biblical usage is perhaps the majority. Indeed 
in practice the only texts which would be broken by a change to the 
combining classes would be biblical texts and quotations which will be 
broken far more comprehensively by these proposals - plus I suppose a 
few typos in modern texts. That makes the objection about the effect on 
index and information servers null and void - no correctly spelled text 
will be affected. Indeed, the effect of merging rather than separating 
or reordering combining classes, which is the main requirement here, is 
in fact not to break existing texts, but only to cause slight confusion 
when future texts are read according to past versions of Unicode. That's 
a bit like insisting that all future versions of Word documents must be 
perfectly readable by all past versions of the program. That might be 
nice for those users who won't update their programs, but does rather 
constrain developers, don't you think?

>The impact of changing the encoding only reaches to the Biblical Hebrew
>community who cannot use Unicode as it is currently defined. Will that
>community object to the only hope of being able to use Unicode for
>representing their text?
>  
>
PK: For one thing they will need to be a lot more sure than I am now 
that this is the only hope. What about my alternative proposals? Even 
so, I cannot see the biblical Hebrew community in Israel, which is a 
considerable proportion of the whole and regularly uses modern Hebrew as 
well, accepting any proposal which draws an artificial line between 
biblical and modern Hebrew.

>The idea of depricating the entire Hebrew block and creating a new one
>is much worse than the surgical changes in Peter Constable's proposal.
>Your suggestion would break every Hebrew document in the world. Whereas
>the proposal that has been submitted only impacts the narrow, but
>important, world of Biblical Hebrew.
>
PK: OK, let's just deprecate the existing Hebrew nikud and meteg. That 
doesn't impact the huge majority of modern Hebrew texts which don't use 
them. It impacts basically only those using the existing nikud, which 
are broken anyway.

>My guess is that the majority of Biblical Hebrew corpus is not yet in
>Unicode format. Additionally, I would contend that writing a converter
>to change to a new format, when it is approved, would be a trivial task.
>
>Regards,
>
>Paul
>  
>
-- 
Peter Kirk
peter.r.kirk at ntlworld.com
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/




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